I'm reading On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong, and I'm not sure whether I'm grasping the right meaning of this sentence.
He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once.
The narrator is describing a sixteen-year-old teenager named Trevor who is his lover. The way I see it, he is being described as someone who is trying to escape (his body/his life) and at the same time discovering or exploring himself (his new body/his new life now that he's turning into an adult). However, I'm not a native English speaker and thus this might be referring to something else that I'm missing.
This is the context:
Under my fingers, the stretch marks above his knees, on his shoulders, and the base of his spine shone silver and new. He was a boy breaking out and into himself at once. That’s what I wanted— not merely the body, desirable as it was, but its will to grow into the very world that rejects its hunger.
